


Carmilla Karnstein, Immortality and Absurdism

by lesbians_and_puns



Series: Meta [1]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Analysis, Character Analysis, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 03:59:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4945879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbians_and_puns/pseuds/lesbians_and_puns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I put this up on Tumblr a little while ago. Figured it might as well go up here too.</p></blockquote>





	Carmilla Karnstein, Immortality and Absurdism

Carmilla Karnstein is immortal. She is simultaneously forever eighteen years old, and eternally aging, though her body does not reflect it. She is a paradox. Her humanity was stripped from her at eighteen (for isn’t the essence of humanity the promise of death?) and yet she lives, loves, suffers.

There is a short story by José B. Adolph called _Nosotros, no_ (us, no). It is an incredible work, and its fundamental point comes from the fact that its title is first an expression of jealousy on the part of the writer that those under 20, unlike him, will be able to achieve immortality through a series of injections every hundred years. However, in the end, it is an expression of thankfulness that he will escape this hell. Below is an excerpt from a translation of the story, with parts important to my analysis bolded:

> All we could do was wait… Until yesterday. When a fifteen year old boy, his body with the injection, decided to commit suicide. After the news arrived, we, the mortals, began to love and understand the immortals.
> 
> Because **they are the poor, young and formless tadpoles condemned to a perpetual prison on the pond of life. Perpetual. Eternal.** And we began to suspect that inside of ninety-nine years, on the day of the second injection, the police will be looking for thousands of immortals **in order to impose eternity upon them.**
> 
> And the third injection, and the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth; each time with less volunteers, and so on until more of these eternal children will be implored to evasion, the end, salvation. The hunt will be dreadful. **They will always be miserable.**
> 
> **But no, not us.**

I am going to ignore the religious overtones of the piece (that immortality is fundamentally wrong because it robs people of their salvation) because that is way too much for one Tumblr post about a character on a webseries. However, Adolph’s fundamental point remains the same… Immortality is a condemnation to misery, a hell, a torture. It is an imposition.

A short story by Mary Shelley, _The Mortal Immortal_ , adds to this view. She paints a man who became immortal unintentionally (much as Carmilla) as “A sailor without rudder or compass, tossed on a stormy sea–a traveller lost on a wide-spread heath, without landmark or star to him.” It is also interesting to point out, in the context of Ell and Laura, that Shelley has the creator of the elixir (which the narrator drank, not knowing what its true purpose was) describe it as “a cure for love and for all things.” Apathy?

Another short story, this time by Jorge Luis Borges, also suggests that immortality begets apathy. In _El inmortal_ (The Immortal), Borges writes, “There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.” Ah, absurdism, here you are at last.

 

* * *

 

 

Borges and Camus both advocate universal guilt. Borges writes “over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men… Viewed in that way, all our acts are just, though also unimportant.” He goes on to claim that “No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men.”

Camus seems to agree in his final novel, _The Fall_ , the most complex of his works. He argues that man is duplicitous, that goodness is self-serving. Jean-Baptiste, the central character, confesses his hypocrisy. “Modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress. I used to wage war by peaceful means.“ And yet once, he let a woman drown, and this has haunted him forever. Guilt, for Camus, is not reserved for our actions. It is for our inactions too; we are condemned by what we have failed to prevent. His morality is strict - “No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.”

And yet, he disagrees fundamentally with Borges regarding justice - to Camus, as illustrated in _The Fall_ , justice does not exist in the way we would normally perceive it; if we are all guilty, pursuing justice is absurd - one guilty man may not condemn another. Or, as Carmilla says in 1.23… “Ethics are a ridiculous game played by children who think they can impose order on an arbitrary universe.”

Jean-Baptiste’s confession in _The Fall_ is not of _his_ sins, it is a confession of _every_ sin. His story is your story, my story, our story. Our confessions are one. “We’re going forward, but nothing changes.”

 

* * *

 

 

As Camus, the essential absurdist, writes, the myth of Sisyphus is tragic “because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”

Carmilla is damningly conscious. She seems to view her immortality as a burden, something she _must_ live with rather than something she can live with. To live with rather than to live for. Fundamentally, Carmilla reminds me of a line from a C.S. Lewis sermon called “The Weight of Glory” - “the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised.” Carmilla sees the endless expanse of the universe and sees suffering, pain, darkness. I would argue you could look at the same infinity and see beauty, love, lightness. Her universe is darker than mine.

Or is it? She answered a Tumblr ask about why she likes the stars by saying this:

> The night and the stars let us see what has been there all along, the vastness of the Universe stretching wide beyond us. How insignificant we are, and at the same time how unfathomably lucky: The Universe is indifferent, arbitrary. It owes us nothing. But the arbitrary can be a miracle, and dark of the void is full of stars.

Ah, there she is, my little lover of Camus. Her universe is not kind, but nor is it cruel - it is indifferent. It is not dark, but nor is it light - it is _full of stars_. “In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.” Her absurdism is Camus to the end.

As for the reason why she hasn’t shown this yet? Carmilla’s first hundred years must have been terrible, marked by pain, loss and suffering. Her immortality was new, and with her adolescent vampiric urges and bloodlust, damning. Not only did she see and experience pain and loss, she caused it. Her apathy is a responsive apathy, not an innate one. It is a desensitization, a trauma.

I will leave you with a quote from Oliver Sacks, about a man with Korsakov’s syndrome. Though it is about someone suffering from a form of dementia, it describes well the struggle of a conscious absurdist such as Camus: “For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing - and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.”

Let us hope we see Carmilla create meaning soon, instead of resigning herself to the endless gray expanse of immortal apathy.

**Author's Note:**

> I put this up on Tumblr a little while ago. Figured it might as well go up here too.


End file.
